linuxword update

[Joey Hess]

Quick news update: We will have 500 3-cd sets of debian 2.0r3 to give away
                   at the expo!

Oh good, somebody brought this up. It's very important, and I haven't had
the time to give it the work it needs.

gecko@benham.net wrote:
> Consider our target audience... I've never been to one of these but from
> what I understand, we're going to be facing businesses (and businessmen). 
> How interested are they going to be in the install routine compared to
> what they can *do* with Debian... and Debian's support network... and I'm
> sure there are more.

I *hope* that Linuxworld will really be composed of equal parts suits and
linux people. I'd like to appeal to both sets. I'm personally focused more
toward the latter so I'm glad to hear Darren's ideas.

First a word about booth design. My basic plan is to have a L-shaped booth.
Something like this:

# = tabletop
O = chair

         ..............    Aisle   ..............

----------------------+------------------------+-------------------
                      |#################       |
                      |#################       |
                      |#################       |
                      |  O    O    ###         |
 Neighbor booth       |            ###  O      |   Neighbor booth
                      |         O  ###         |
		      |            ###  O      |
		      |         O  ###         |
		      |            ###  O      |
		      | Debian Booth           |
		      +------------------------+

On the front of the L facing people who walk by, we have the most impressive
machines, running the most eye-caching stuff, plus some hyper people to pull
people in and give out CD's and stuff. (Note: I have caffenated penguin
mints guarenteed to make anyone hyper. ;-)

On the side of the L, we have a quieter space where people can actually sit
down and use a debian system and ask questions.

So I think we need 4 types of displays:

1. ultra-cool eye-catching thing to pull in suits
2. ultra-cool eye-catching thing to pull in the clued
3. buisnesslike stuff to keep the suits interested
4. typical techy stuff for the clued to play with.

The small amount of thought I've given to this before yeilded a few ideas:

category 4:

- a computer with an xterm with dselect in it, and gnome-apt, both running.
  This would be on one of the VA boxes we can trash, so they could run as
  root and actually be played with. The intent is to show off gnome-apt
- a debian install
- a monitor hooked up to a developer's laptop as they build, sign, and
  upload a debian package to master. yes, I intend on doing this a few times
  during the conference. ;-)
- irc.debian.org, as #debian counts down to slink's release. Need I say more?
  ;-)

I think it's clear that category 4 is a synch.

category 1:

- several of the the coolest animated 3-d, CPU-leeching programs we can find,
  all running at once. I think this kind of thing _does_ impress buisness
  people.
- need more

category 2:

- several of the the coolest animated 3-d, CPU-leeching programs we can find,
  all running at once.
- text. Lots of text scrolling very fast. I always find that very appealing.
  Perhaps a dump of every line of source code in debian, with a little ticking
  counter at the top. Could we scroll the entire source code of debian in 3
  days?

category 3:

- all I can think of is buisness-like apps and server applications. We can't
  really demo a speedy network server since we have no speedy network
  connection.


What'd be great if if some people sat down and wrote some code for some of
these ideas or any idea of your own. Send them in and we can run them on the
booth.

-- 
see shy jo